Cutting through the Noise with Voice Commands

Alexa and Siri Won't Work in Noisy Environments

Voice assistants are everywhere, especially in people’s homes. We use Alexa, Siri, and Google Home to control our lights, answer trivia questions, and play music. Notably, sales of voice assistant devices have more than doubled in the last year.1

Beyond the home, more people are using voice commands on their phones.
By 2020, nearly half of all internet searches are predicted to be voice driven.2 Why type when you can talk? Speech recognition is now three times faster than a human for short phrases.3

Not far behind the consumer marker, the business world is catching on. Unlike households (well, some households), business environments are often noisy. Even further, daily activities are not transferable from business to business. A financial trader wants to pull up a chart of Apple’s stock price. A first responder needs to look up warrants for an address. A logistics professional will pull up orders from the last three months. These noisy workplaces make developing skills challenging.

What’s a skill?

To help people, voice assistants have specific “skills” they can understand. These skills have an “intent” and “entities” related to that “intent”. You might tell your Amazon Echo “Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights”. The “intent” of the voice command is what Alexa should do. The entities are the action “turn on” and the object “bedroom lights.”

These skills often fail in noisy environments. Let’s say you were building a skill to react to the command:

Get me directions to 55 West Monroe Street

Behind each voice command is a voice-to-text transcription engine. In practice, this is at most 95% accurate, and 75% or less accurate in noisy environments. You may get transcripts back like this:

Scribe ranks these by how much they sound like the audio it heard. Discovery searches the rich output to find the targeted terms.

In our example, Discovery finds not just the target address, but also these other possible addresses:

55 West Monroe Street5 West Monroe Street55 West Monroe55 Monroe5 Monroe55 West Rose55 Western5 Western

As a developer, you can build skills for transcripts with no mistakes. Discovery will sort through all possible transcripts for you, uncovering 10-25% more entities than present in the transcript, clearly an advantage in noisier environments.